The Golden Age & Dream Days

To the children of these pages, the grown-ups who rule their lives are the Olympians: remote, slow, unaccountable gods who own the orchard but never climb the trees.

Not yet released. This edition is finished and in production. Write to the press and we will let you know the day it goes on sale.

About this edition

Between the two nations, child and grown-up, there is no treaty and little translation. Kenneth Grahame, writing as a man who had forgotten nothing, set down the border wars with a tenderness and a wit that made him famous overnight.

The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898) are those chronicles, gathered here in one volume: a holiday, a whitewashed uncle, the finding of a princess over the garden wall, burglars and Argonauts and the long white road to Rome. And in Dream Days, the tale that outgrew the book that held it, The Reluctant Dragon, the gentle, sonnet writing beast who would very much rather not fight St. George, and the boy who arranges a truce. Swinburne thought the two books between them the most delightful ever written. A decade later their author would follow the same river down to The Wind in the Willows.

This edition restores the illustrations that made the original volumes treasures: the full suite of Maxfield Parrish’s photogravure plates from the Bodley Head editions, dreaming, luminous, and among the most beloved book pictures of their age, one at the head of every story. Complete and unabridged, with a new note on Grahame’s life and work, bound behind an original painting.

Details

• Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932), illustrated by Maxfield Parrish (1870–1966)
• Both collections complete: The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898), with 28 Parrish plates
• Solocosmo Press
• The Lightbound Library
• Paperback and hardcover, 6 × 9, 320 pages